3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Ballerina

2023,  Chung-Hyun Lee (The Call) -- Netflix

The reveng-ening continues.

Not the be confused with the coming John Wick: Ballerina but also to be confused with it. It borrows a lot of style from Wick. Revenge flicks are not high cinema, but they can be elevated... elevating? John Wick definitely did what I wanted standard fare, trope driven movies to do --- do it with style and do something different. It set a bar. But if I am being honest, and when I am ever not here, I am ready for that bar to be moved.... higher? Or even just replaced? Just like there was an era of every movie being compared to / called "the next..." Taken. I am ready for there to be a replacement flick to dominate the action movie trope mindset.

But at least Ballerina picks up that bar and gives me a very different looking & feeling Korean women with guns flick. I have seen a fare share of Korean action & drama & TV, but this one felt unfamiliar in styling to me, almost suggesting it may have picked up some of its visual cues from the romantic genres I don't subscribe to, but are all over my stream services. It just so often looked so very ... pretty. 

Jang Ok-ju (Jeon Jong-seo, The Call) is a violent young woman who built an unexpected friendship with Choi Min-hee (Park Yu-rim, Miraculous Brothers), a young woman hoping to be a ballerina. Ok-ju is the classic character with a violent past, someone likely working as an enforcer for crime syndicates, or as a Rake-style operative for a corporation. With Min-hee she finds what she has been missing -- gentleness, and sweetness. Until she finds Min-hee in a bathtub, a suicide due to shame, shame for being extorted for sexual acts. 

Ok-ju figures out the extortion racket pretty easily. The sex trafficker Choi Pro (Kim Ji-hoon, Rich Family's Son) meets pretty young women in trendy nightclubs, drugs them, shoots videos of them, and then uses the shame of that act, and the threat of sharing it with the world, to extort them into being prostitutes at his syndicate's brothel / love hotel. The younger the girl, the better. You would think this would be a uniquely east Asian concept relying upon a culture's desperate desire to avoid bringing shame to a family, but all you have to do is Google, to find it happening in our back yard.

Ok-ju's revenge plan (pretend to be one of these nightclub girls) works, mostly, and she gravely injures the Choi before being forced to flee, but not before she pulls another girl out of the brothel, a high school aged girl. Now she needs a new plan. She realizes now that Choi's entire gang is out to get her, she needs help, and to be properly armed. The divergence of North American / European crime movies is so apparent here, where she goes back to her old job for help, and is sent to a shady gun dealer, the equivalent to buying guns from the back trunk of a drug dealer's car which we see in all the movies. Except most of his guns are in shit condition. Attaining a gun must require so many layers of bureaucracy in Korea that finding "lost" ones is a challenge. 

Meanwhile Choi has displeased his boss. Not only was his brothel gig on the side, and making him tons of money he kept to himself (explicitly visible via his sports car) but now he has exposed the gang to someone seeking revenge.  Take care of it, or else, is the message he gets from his boss. So he tracks down Ok-ju, but again she escapes. But they take the highschool girl.

Again Ok-ju tracks them down, this time to the entire gang's headquarters, where she completes the final act of ultra-violence these movies rely upon -- the slow, methodical take down of every Bad Guy, starting with the gang's leader. Guns first, dropped when empty of bullets, and then knives and whatever is handy, Ok-ju is a killing machine. Eventually she finds Choi and the girl, who is surprisingly still alive. She subdues the trafficker, and takes him to a beach where she and Min-hee had many carefree hours together. He offers her anything, everything, to stay alive --- she roasts him with a flamethrower., and then his expensive care.

What's with the detailed plot recap? Doesn't strike me as anything out of the expected there?

When I am watching these movies, I am seeking the formula I "enjoy" to play out. I am not bothered by a lack of ingenuity in the story itself. Revenge stories play as revenge stories. But I am looking for something to tie me to it, a visual style, characters that elicit sympathy, an aesthetic that I can admire. I got this in droves here. There is a flair here (and there) that I enjoyed, and it still had an internal continuity and logic that it did not betray. 

For example, when Ok-ju meets Min-hee, the former is dark haired and plain looking, the latter with bleached blonde hair and makeup, a girl who cares about her appearance. But when Min-hee dies, it is she with the dark hair, and Ok-ju sports blonde locks. While the violent girl was coming out her malaise of anger, the ballerina was falling into darkness. Ok-ju has lost her opportunity at peace, normality, gentleness. 

Not sure you answered my question.

Yeah, well live with it. Something about the tale demanded a retelling.